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MOTOR HOME MASSACRE (2005)
Bullshit cover alert: this film has no chainsaws I rented a stack of obviously direct-to-video, obviously low-budget movies that I'd never heard of and chose mostly on how much I liked the cover art. I figured, look, a movie going direct to video isn't the mark of cain it used to be, and there's no shame in a filmmaker going that route if that's what gets his movie seen. And there's no good reason the low-low-budget horror flicks of today can't stack up to the low-low-budget horror flicks of the past - there's nothing that was getting captured on film then that can't be captured on high-quality video now, except for the magic of my youth. I'm not one of those crotchety old bastards who's always complaining that the good old days are gone and that they don't make them like they used to - I just recognize that said magic is more responsible for that perception of these lost glory days than is the actual material getting made. Thing is, movies like Motor Home Massacre make it hard for me to keep believing that. What's beneath the bargain basement? The freebie sub-basement? The pay-for-play parking garage? Motor Home Massacre opens with a preposterously elaborate way to kill a naked chick in a tent, something the filmmakers thought clever enough to include again in flashback twenty minutes or so later (plus as an image in the DVD's main menu screen). Don't get too used to that nudity though; while the female cast of this movie really knows how to fill out a tank top (WOW, do they ever!), they don't generally know how to bust out of one. Seven more-or-less friends (who mostly don't seem to like each other) are vacationing in a 70's motor home. There's a happy couple ("I thought of you when I saw these. They're beautiful, just like you!"), another happy couple (a fox-tastic girl and a not-funny guy who talks in this "southern wigger" talk I can't understand, except when he said "Just because I'm white, don't mean I can't relate to my peeps!"), a ruthlessly obnoxious prankster/lecher who looks about ten years older than everyone else and spends much of his screen time farting, waggling his tongue and picking his nose; a marvellously top-heavy blonde who's getting over a bad breakup, and the geeky odd-man-out driver, who's like Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club. They encounter a rural gas station attendant who has a jar of pickled pigs' feet, plays pocket pool when the girls come in and tells them all of trouble out there at Black Creek; replaying that opening flashback is the only mayhem this movie's first hour has. Instead of violence and fright, we more often are subjected to prankster-guy's repulsive antics, and...well, his slightly less repulsive antics. That the movie switches gears on him later on and tries to make him a focal point of sympathy for about ten minutes suggests the filmmakers intended for him to be a Stifler- or Cartman-like character. Motor Home Massacre is not without a sense of humor, though it could only have helped to have been made more straight-faced, seeing as that humor is exemplified by the book "Men Are From Uranus", and an extended Three's Company misunderstanding sequence where one girl tries fishing a knife out of a guy's pocket (with no eavesdroppers to misunderstand it - so what makes this funny?). I did laugh once, at the following exchange: "Don't you care about your buddy out there?" "Is he dead?" "Yeah." "Then no!" Tanya Fraser does exhibit some charm as a girl who keeps showing up with doomed campers, and Shan Holleman tries her best to put some believable grief and pain into her breakup backstory; she also gets a fun rant at the end while she bonks an assailant with a frying pan. Still, except for a mildly (very mildly) imaginative use of a cell phone, this is by-the-numbers dead-eyed slasher autopilot from beginning til end, showing us little we haven't seen a million times before, done better, and by actresses that do nudity. Not every horror movie can be Dawn Of The Dead, but if you can't put in the effort to make it a little special and unique, even if it's just a potboiler, even if it's "just" a slasher flick or "just" direct-to-video, then...well isn't that sad? Take a little pride in your work, people. Like a lot of grade-z horror flicks, Motor Home Massacre looks like it must've been fun to make for the cast and filmmakers. I'm guessing that the experience of making it was a lot more fun than the experience of showing the finished product to anyone whose opinion they value and respect. (c) Brian J. Wright 2007 BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |